Tudor England: A History

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In Mary's case, my argument is not, at least primarily, about her later image; it is that, though she had supporters and was skilful at representing herself as she wished – as wife of a Habsburg – such a representation drew detractors in her own lifetime and contributed during her lifetime to negative images, which were bequeathed to later history, not invented by it. WOODING: No, although girls in the village would also have the… well, they would get a basic education probably within the home. And, there were, kind of, much more unassuming schools where, you know, sometimes girls might be educated. WOODING: Because this is the era of Renaissance and because everyone in Europe is preoccupied with the past—with the classical past and with the biblical past. in the 16th century, their idea of progress is not forward looking like ours might be today. I mean, nowadays, you know, we look forward to—I don’t know—colonizing Mars or finding a cure for cancer. BOGAEV: Well, Henry VIII of course had plenty of drama, and he is such a towering figure in popular culture even now. What’s most misunderstood or misrepresented about him? You write, he wasn’t a libidinous predator.

Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ The story of the Tudor monarchs is as astounding as it was unexpected, but it was not the only one unfolding between 1485 and 1603. In cities, towns, and villages, families and communities lived their lives through times of great upheaval. In Tudor England: A History, Lucy Wooding lets their voices speak, exploring not just how monarchs ruled but also how men and women thought, wrote, lived, and died. I am of course fully aware that this was a period of bitter religious and political division- which indeed representations were often designed to temper, if not deny. But short of a full political narrative (as well as my subject) I didn?t see how these could be related and I took them as given and well known.Dive deep into the world’s largest Shakespeare collection and access primary sources from the early modern period. In London, however, this was not quite the case. 1558, the year we analyse in this episode, was one of tension and surprise. Mary’s death in November was not anticipated. When it came it brought attention, scrutiny and power to Elizabeth. As Wooding explains, people had been watching the young princess carefully for a long time. Now, it seemed, she would be forced to show herself. WOODING: Yes, but Shakespeare’s got to be careful because Elizabeth is, you know, still a very powerful memory. And Protestantism is still a bit precarious. And, also, we are not entirely sure, are we, where Shakespeare’s own religious loyalties lay? So, if you are going to talk about the religious politics of the 1530s and 1540s, it’s getting a little bit close to home and you might well find yourself in trouble. So yeah, you could see why you need to sort of steer carefully around Henry VIII as a subject. In Sharpe’s understanding, this had profound consequences. He argues that ‘the shift from a representational state to a public sphere effected a change to a state in which the mystification of majesty became less the programme of rulers and governments and more the election and desire of subjects and citizens’. At one level, therefore, this study of representations is the study of popular political empowerment. From the start, Sharpe links his arguments to the modern preoccupation with ‘spin’, and it is surely significant that the seed of this project was sown during the 1980s, when the author lived for a time in both England and America, and observed the ways in which contemporary political processes were changing. This history of ‘Tudor spin’ makes it clear that representations of rule, even if they were not created at the popular level, were given force by the ways in which they were received and understood by the populace. It is not just that the ‘language of signs in early modern England was by no means the monopoly of the elite’. It is that what mattered was how these signs were read, rather than how they were intended to be read. Many of the media used ‘deployed a language of request and reciprocity’. Sharpe notes, for example, how royal letters, ‘in writing, performing and publishing an act of power also exposed power as script, performance and publication’. The language of government might be understood as a ‘fiction of state’, open to interpretation and challenge at all times.

The giving and consumption of food underlines an important political point about Tudor England: namely, that the most important relationships were always understood as having a personal element. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, advising his son Robert on the rules of political life, told him how to maintain a friendship with anyone eminent: ‘Compliment him often with many, yet small, gifts, and of little charge. And if thou hast cause to bestow any great gratuity, let it be something which may be daily in sight.’ [26] The Lisle family in Calais maintained their links with Henry VIII by sending everything from boar’s head to sturgeon, as well as the quails that Jane Seymour craved while pregnant. [27] Their envoy in London could begin a letter by announcing that ‘I presented the King with the cherries in my lady’s name, which he was very glad of, and thanks you and her both for them.’ [28] The Lisles adopted a particularly familiar tone in their exchanges to underline the point that they really were family: Arthur, Lord Lisle, was Elizabeth of York’s illegitimate brother. Thomas Cromwell’s accounts record the rewards dispensed to those who brought gifts such as arti­chokes, quinces and porpoise; and Robert Dudley responded to tributes, including a brace of puffins from the earl of Derby. [29] The rarity of certain foodstuffs, or the fact that – like cherries – they were only briefly in season, heightened the value of the gift. Water and Beer But what did this mean for the ordinary people of England? What was their experience of life like as the monarchs came and went? Wooding explains that many parishes life went on, with continuous readjustments, in a relatively uninterrupted manner.

Transcript

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I think that this is also an age of such sort of vivid imaginative communication. It’s such a great age of literature, that so much of that still shapes our imagination today. And that has a kind of universal appeal still. I mean, you know, Shakespeare’s never really lost his ability to inspire. In cities, towns, and villages, families and communities lived their lives through times of great upheaval. In this comprehensive new history, Lucy Wooding lets their voices speak, exploring not just how monarchs ruled but also how men and women thought, wrote, lived, and died. We see a monarchy under strain, religion in crisis, a population contending with war, rebellion, plague, and poverty. Remarkable in its range and depth, Tudor England explores the many tensions of these turbulent years and presents a markedly different picture from the one we thought we knew. But, towards the end of his reign when he was so anxious about the succession, when he was so anxious about what he had unleashed by breaking with Rome, I think there is a menacing tone to many of his actions, to his manipulation of faction. WOODING: Shakespeare didn’t take him on, did he? But then, I mean, I don’t think Shakespeare is interested in the kings who succeed, exactly. I mean, he’s more interested, isn’t he, in the turbulent era of the Wars of the Roses. In this episode Dr Lucy Wooding tells us more about these two fascinating characters. Mary and Elizabeth were the first women to rule England in their own right. United in complicated ways by their blood, it turned out that there would be an even greater division when it came to their faith.There is some mild revisionism. Henry VII is rescued from later Tudor propaganda and shown to be a half decent king. Mary I's reputation as the sadistic burner of Protestants is put into the context by the more than double the number killed under Elizabeth after the failed Northern uprising (although of course it is the burnings that did for Mary's reputation, not simply the number). The official blog of Yale University Press London. We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else...

Lucy Wooding is the Langford Fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College, Oxford University. Her book Tudor England: A History is published by Yale University Press. We can’t seem to get enough of the Tudor dynasty and its soap-opera twists. But in her book Tudor England: A History, Lucy Wooding argues that to really know the Tudors you must look past the famous names and racy plotlines. While Wooding visits the period’s kings and queens—was Henry VIII the lusty man we imagine? How “bloody” was Mary? What about Henry VII?—she also leaves the court to roam England’s streets and fields. I do think one thing that set them apart though, is that even the wealthy in Tudor society quite often had a really powerful sense of social responsibility towards the poor. Something which I think, well, I think perhaps compares favorably with attitudes today. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 13; Thomas Elyot, The Castell of Helth (1539), STC 7643, fos. 33v–34r. It’s interesting that, you know, with Anne Boleyn, he’s already had an affair with her sister. So yeah, no surprises there. So, I don’t think seeing him as some kind of sexual predator is really at all appropriate.

William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. G. Edelen (Washington, DC, and London, 1994), 216. J ust before Whitsunday in the summer of 1549, a fight broke out in the playground of a school in Bodmin. When the dust had settled and questions were asked, the authorities discovered that the children had divided into two gangs, or rather ‘two factions, the one whereof they called the old religion, the other the new’. In this, the children revealed themselves to be remarkably acute commentators on wider social developments. Not long after, on 9 June (Whitsunday itself), the government of Edward VI imposed the Book of Common Prayer on every parish church in England. The time-hallowed Latin mass was replaced with an English text. The West Country exploded with what’s known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, one of the greatest popular risings of the 16th century. ‘If there was a single point in time that separated the old world and the new,’ writes Lucy Wooding in her magnificent new survey of Tudor England, this was it. Sharpe argues that early modern historians need to wake up to a body of evidence which has been neglected for far too long. The many different ways in which monarchs were represented - by themselves, their courtiers, their subjects and their critics - have something of vital importance to tell us about the exercise of power in the 16th century. ‘The business of government was the act of securing compliance’, and by studying representations of authority we can see how this was attempted, mediated, received and implemented. He sees this as ‘negotiation rather than autocratic enactment’, and suggests that the 16th century saw a wide range of responses to the ‘uncertainty in early modern England about whether government was an act of faith or statecraft’. This was not a matter of the simple imposition of authority, or a straightforward attempt to manipulate popular opinion. Representations of the monarch were crafted by an array of different individuals at all levels of society, and the same image could be communicated and understood in many different ways. Portraits might flatter both the subject and the patron; royal progresses could have several scripts; portraying a monarch as an Old Testament character was open to pious or prophane readings. WOODING: It’s been a very, sort of, powerful part of the stories that the English—later the British—like to tell about their own history. That Protestantism wasn’t, until very recently, understood in British culture to be a superior form of Christianity. And anti-Catholic prejudice has survived into the 21st century. It still, you know, affects the role of the Monarch today. I think the assumption always was that the pre-Reformation Church must have been a disaster, because Protestantism must have naturally been the reaction against that. So, you know, for generations we took the view that the late medieval church was unpopular and oppressive and that it alienated its congregations by worshiping only in Latin. He’s distancing himself from his father. He therefore sort of buys into this idea that his father was miserly and a bit oppressive.